by Stuart Atkinson

Editor's note: We are excited about offering this major work by author Stuart Akinson in Meteorite Times. We are very interested in getting some feed back about what you think of the story as it unfolds chapter by chapter. So please drop me a line and let me know what you think.      mailto:editorSee Home Page Fore Email Address

In her dreams she always went back home, to Scotland.

This time, she was standing on the top of her favorite cliffs, halfway along the rugged western coast, looking out towards the Hebrides. As the howling wind buffeted her, blowing her long, dark hair out behind her into a chestnut-colored comet tail, she filled her nostrils with the smell of the ocean, savoring the scent of the salt and the sea. Far below, waves slapped and crashed against the rocks, each impact an explosion of surf which covered her in foamy spray, chilling her cheeks and making her eyes sting. Above, white V’s standing out against the gunmetal grey clouds, gulls wheeled and dived, screeching as they rode the surging air currents. And out on the far horizon, black storm clouds, boiling in from the ocean.

Wind and rain and salt and sea. Home. Her home -

"Fee..? Fee..."

A voice, far away, calling to her from somewhere over the edge of the world...

"Come on, time to get up... we have work to do.."

Something shook her, gently, and as the dreamscape evaporated, blowing away to vapors on the sleepwinds, she slowly opened one eye. Her father was kneeling beside her, smiling, one hand on her shoulder and the other holding a mug of steaming coffee. "Morning sleepyhead," he laughed quietly, ruffling her already-messed hair, "time to go hunting...!"

Fiona nodded - then closed her eyes and pulled the covers back over her head, not daring to say what she was thinking. After all, her father didn’t have a clue she knew words like that.

An hour later she stepped outside, washed and dressed and warmed by a further two cups of coffee and a breakfast of beans and eggs ("A cowboy breakfast!" her dad declared proudly as he passed her the plate). It was another beautifully clear day, with a white-hot Sun already blazing in the east, and not a hint of cloud anywhere to be seen. The early morning sky above her was a light, powder blue, but she knew that by the time they got out "into the field" it would have darkened to a glorious shade of cobalt; the air above the Nullabor was as pure and as transparent as could be found anywhere on Earth.

The clear air let through a lot of heat too, and even though the morning air felt chilly she knew that by mid-day the temperature would have climbed into the nineties, easily. She made a mental note to remember her hat.

Stretching, and yawning, she turned her back on the camper and headed for the remains of the previous evening’s camp fire. It had been one of her best yet, a mini pyre in fact, but now all that was left was a dark stain on the desert floor, as if someone had dropped a bag of coal dust and it had split open on the hard ground. Of the twigs and kindling there was nothing left. As it should be.

You did a good job there, she congratulated herself, stubbing at the ashes with her toe whilst running her hands through her hair. It was still loose, as she preferred it, but she knew she would have to tie it up before the hunt began. Usually that would have annoyed her, but today it didn’t seem to matter. Standing there she felt refreshed, alive. It wasn’t just that it felt good to be in sunlight again after the oppressive darkness of the desert night, thought that was true. She just felt... ready to take on the world. Come on, she said, looking up at the huge sky, take your best shot, do your worst, today we’re going to beat you..!

Shielding her eyes from the Sun she stared out across the plain, marveling at the sheer scale of the place - and of the task ahead of them. A month before, when her father had bounced into her room to announce that their next big "adventure" would be to Australia, she’d checked out area on the net, and had been amazed by what she’d found. The Nullabor was a vast limestone plateau, the floor of an ancient ocean covering almost 300,000 square kilometers. It was almost completely uninhabited ("Really?" she’d laughed, scrolling through the pictures) and the only sign of Man’s presence was the long, straight line of the Trans-Australia Railway which slashed across it like a scar. It was a third of a million square kilometers of emptiness. Even the name, Nullabor, declared its barrenness; nullus arbor was Greek, meaning "no trees".

Soon after arriving Fiona had decided that Nullabor was Fee-speak for "Nothing Out There", because there was simply nothing to see at all. No trees, no buildings, no rivers or hills, just miles and miles of flat rock, stretching all the way to the razor-sharp horizon in all directions. It was like being in the middle of some vast ocean of brown stone, and standing there she could easily picture herself as an ant, she felt that small and insignificant.

But there was no room for such thoughts, not on such a glorious morning. Shaking out her hair one last, self-indulgent time, she ducked into the nearby storage tent to grab her gear.

When she emerged, half an hour later her long hair, her pride and joy, was tucked up and hidden beneath a large bush hat - without dangling corks, despite her father’s best attempts to accessorize it. A loose white t-shirt - emblazoned with her own "Rock Hound!" design - topped off her desert outfit of dusty denim shorts and heavy duty boots. Hanging from the front of the no-nonsense, heavy-duty carpenter’s belt she had tightened around her slim waist were a large water canteen, a portable phone, a small auto-focus camera, a small but powerful pair of binoculars and a leather tool pouch. A deceptively-small Global Positioning System handset hung from the left side of the belt, looking for all the world like a gunslinger’s pistol as it rested against her thigh. Her fierce brown eyes were hidden behind strong sunshades. She was Ready.

She couldn’t help smiling as she tapped the shades in their centre. Lara Croft vs the desert. The desert didn’t have a chance..!

Hearing the camper van door slide shut she turned to see her father walking towards her, wolf-whistling at her transformation from sleepyhead to hunter. She blushed, as always, and made a big show out of looking him up and down in return. She had to admit he looked every inch the adventurer in his green canvas trousers and shirt. With equipment belts criss-crossing his chest and his unruly mop of black hair forced up inside a creased and crumpled hat, if he’d had a whip he could have passed for Indiana Jones himself.

But in his hand he carried something far more useful to a meteorite hunter than a whip. Like most of his equipment, the metal detector had seen better days, and looked as old as it was. But it was reliable, and had proved itself a loyal and trustworthy companion on countless previous expeditions. She could no more imagine him without it than she could imagine him without his head. Or that darned lantern. It was a part of him, it was as simple as that.

Although she recognized the value of metal detectors, she preferred to travel light, and relied on less hi-tech equipment than her father’s battered and bent Whites Electronics 5900. In her belt pouch was a circular magnet, ripped out of one of her old bedroom hi-fi’s speakers. It was small, less that two inches across, but it was incredibly powerful. Just touching it against a suspicious-looking stone would tell her if it contained iron or not, and as all meteorites contained traces of that metal, to some degree, even the gentlest attraction towards the magnet would tell her if a candidate rock was worthy of closer study by her father. As she told him, her magnet helped her sort out the "meteorites from the meteor-wrongs". It had never let her down yet.

"You all set?" her father asked, coming up beside her. He sounded quiet though, distant.

Fiona looked into his eyes, and frowned. Usually before beginning a day’s hunting his eyes would look bright and alive, he would have what she called a ‘playful puppy’ look about him, as if nothing was going to stop him enjoying himself. But today... today he seemed quieter, restrained. Distracted. Not like himself at all.

"Oh yeah, ready to roll..!" she beamed back at him, trying to lift his spirits. But he merely smiled back weakly in return. "Dad..? What’s wrong?" she asked, moving closer.

"Oh, nothing," he replied unconvincingly, unable to look her in the eye.

"No, come on," she pressed, reaching for his hand, "tell me..."

"Well... just..." he began hesitantly, "what your mother said, about excuses, being a failure - "

"She didn’t say you were a failure," Fiona corrected him, sounding harsher than she had intended to. He looked stung. "She didn’t," she repeated more softly, "and you weren’t making excuses, I know that..."

* * * * *

Fiona had been to some bleak places in her short life, but the Nullabor was by far the bleakest.

Half an hour’s walk had taken them into the so-called "interior outback", and out of sight of the last lingering trace of civilization. Their camper, the tents, everything they had brought with them onto the plain was lost in the distance, hidden by a shimmering curtain of heat haze. Even her father, only a few hundred yard away to her left, was lost against the unbroken, flat tones of the desert landscape. For all Fiona knew, she could have been the last person on Earth. It certainly felt that way.

Here, out on the plain itself, she finally realized what an alien environment she had been set down in. Everything about the Nullabor was impossible: the sky was impossibly huge, impossibly clear and impossibly blue; the Sun was impossibly bright and hot, a naked nuclear furnace blasting down at her without mercy until her chest and back were both drenched in sweat, and her eyes stung almost badly enough to make her scream; the desert itself was impossibly flat, with no vertical relief anywhere, and she felt like she was walking across a huge, yellow-brown marble slab, without bumps, folds or ridges, like a flea on a plate. And the horizon... it was a ruler drawn line, perfect, no hills broke it, no mountains, not a single gnarled tree, just... just nothing. Blue sky, brown earth, no transition between the two. Impossible.

She stopped to catch her breath, resting her hands on her knees, bending slightly to tip her face out of the Sun, but that only allowed the rays to batter the already-prickling back of her neck. She couldn’t win, it was no use trying.

But she wouldn’t have been anywhere else in the world. This was where she belonged, with her father, searching for starstones. This was her life, and she loved it.

Feeling a vibration against her hip she reached down and plucked the mobile phone off her belt, flipping it open with consummate ease. ‘Just like Captain Kirk’, her father used to tease. If

only, she mused, then she could ask to be beamed up from the brutal hell of a desert by Scotty -

"No, nothing yet," she told her father when he enquired if she’d found anything yet. He sounded frustrated. "We’ve a lot of ground to cover, stop panicking..!" Now it was her turn to tease him, she knew he hated to be accused of panicking; he liked to think of himself as a picture of calmness and serenity. "Okay, yes, I’ll let you know as soon as I spot something," she reassured him gently. "Okay... okay," she repeated, "look dad, I’ve got to go, someone’s at the door... bye!" With that she flipped the phone shut again, picturing the look of confusion on her dad’s face as he scanned the empty desert around him, thinking ‘What door..?’

A small gulp of water later she set off walking again, resuming the hunt.

As she walked her eyes scanned the ground at her feet, panning left, right, left, right, looking for any rocks or stones which looked out of place or just ‘strange’. Like most deserts, the Nullabor was a perfect place to hunt for meteorites; the light-colored rocky ground and lack of surface rocks and greenery made dark meteorites stand out like the proverbial sore thumbs, and the dry desert air, combined with the lack of any real meteorology, protected meteorites from the ravages of rust and weathering. Her father had told her that meteorites had been found in deserts like the Nullabor after laying there for centuries, sometimes even thousands of years. It would be like picking eggs out of a barn..!

Unfortunately, it appeared that none of the chickens had lain anything for those centuries or thousands of years. The barn was empty. She’d seen nothing. And every meter of ground she walked over was as yellow and as flat and as meteorite-free as the last -

There! What was that? She knelt down in front of a darkened patch of earth, upon which lay a reddish-brown... well, something. It was darker than the surrounding rocks, and looked more rounded, just different in general. Trying not to get too excited she unclipped the camera from her belt and fired off a couple of photos, making a permanent record of its location and surroundings, just in case. Then she reached for it and picked it up off the ground, her hand trembling slightly. Calm down, she told herself, calm down...

It was light - a bad sign, meteorites were usually noticeably heavier than indigenous rocks, thanks to their metal content. Examining it closely, holding it up to her eyes, she raised her shades and studied its surface... smooth, scoured by the dusty desert wind. Not even a hint of fusion crust or flow lines. Another bad sign.

She had one last test left. Reaching into her belt pouch she retrieved her magnet, and, resting on her haunches, moved it towards the rock. The two touched with a tiny click, and she pulled them apart again, hoping they’d stick, even briefly. But there was no tug of resistance, no reluctance to be parted.

She sighed. It was just a rock. Dropping the magnet back into its pouch she tossed the rock away, not even bothering to see where it fell. Everywhere looked the same anyway.

Cursing the desert, she walked on.

© Stuart Atkinson 2002